What you may legally print in a church bulletin, and what needs a license first

The bulletin is the only document your church hands to every person who walks in, including the one who has never been in a church building and does not know when to stand. It is also the one document a church routinely fills with material it does not own.

Two questions decide a good bulletin. What goes on the page, in what order. And what you are permitted to reproduce.

A page order that works

1. Church name, date, and the season or Lord’s Day number
2. Call to worship and opening hymn
3. Confession and assurance, with the Scripture references printed
4. Readings, sermon title, preacher, and response song
5. Directions for the Lord’s Supper when it is observed
6. Benediction
7. Short announcements and contact details

Let the service lead the page. A visitor should be able to work out what is happening without reading a paragraph of branding first. Sequence options across traditions are set out in order of worship examples.

Page two and three carry congregational life without competing with the service order: prayer requests at the level the family approved, the week’s reading plan or a link to group studies, the children’s ministry note with where to go, the midweek schedule, and one formation paragraph such as a catechism question or memory verse.

The order is the easy half. Six other decisions get made on the same sheet, and they are the ones a bulletin gets wrong week after week.

The copyright question nobody asks until the letter arrives

Printing a hymn text in a bulletin is reproduction. Reproduction is one of the exclusive rights of a copyright owner. A church that prints four verses of a modern worship song for 200 people has made 200 copies of somebody’s property.

Two things make this manageable.

Most of the historic hymnal is out of copyright. In 2026, US works published before 1931 are in the public domain, according to the Cornell University Library copyright term chart. That covers the great bulk of what a confessional congregation sings: Watts, Wesley, Newton, Cowper, Toplady, the nineteenth-century translations of the Latin and German hymns, and the Psalters.

Two traps sit inside that rule. A modern arrangement, harmonization, or new translation carries its own copyright term even when the underlying text is ancient. And for anything created after 1977, Cornell gives the term as the life of the author plus 70 years, or for a work of corporate authorship, 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever expires first. Which means nothing written in living memory is safe to assume.

A blanket license covers the rest. The CCLI Church Copyright License permits a church to “print song lyrics in bulletins, programs, and song sheets for your congregation,” to project lyrics, to develop custom vocal and instrumental arrangements where no published version exists, to translate lyrics where no published translation exists, and to “record and capture your worship services (audio and video) for archive or limited distribution to those unable to attend in person.” CCLI prices by ministry type rather than one flat rate, and does not publish the calculation on that page.

Note the boundary on that last permission. Archive and limited distribution to those unable to attend is not the same as posting publicly, which CCLI licenses separately. That distinction matters more for what your church posts than for the printed page, but the same license number governs both, and a bulletin editor is usually the person who knows what it is.

Run any text you are about to typeset through two gates in this order, because the free answer comes first.

Three practical rules follow.

• Print the CCLI or equivalent license number on the bulletin where you reproduce licensed text. This is standard practice and it takes one line.
• Keep a one-page record of which songs came from where, so the annual reporting is a filing job rather than an archaeology project.
• If you are reproducing a text you cannot place before 1931 and cannot find on your license, print the hymn number and the first line instead of the full text. It costs the congregation nothing and it ends the problem.

Accessibility, which is voluntary and should not be

Religious organizations are outside ADA Title III. The Department of Justice states it plainly: Title III does not apply to religious organizations, which sit alongside private clubs as exceptions to the public accommodations rules. DOJ’s separate web accessibility guidance addresses state and local government under Title II and businesses open to the public under Title III, and points to WCAG and the Section 508 Standards as the technical references without mandating one.

So no federal rule requires your bulletin to be readable by an 80-year-old with macular degeneration. Your ninth commandment obligation to your own members has not been suspended by that.

Four decisions do most of the work.

• Two fonts maximum, one for headings and one for body. Set the body large. A sanctuary is dimmer than the office where the file was designed, and a proof read on a monitor tells you nothing about a pew at 10:30am.
• Black on white or cream. Reversed type, grey text, and text over a photograph all lose in low light.
• Leave margin beside the sermon text so people can write.
• Skip full-bleed photography. It eats the ink budget and adds nothing a stained glass rule or a plain cross does not.

If you publish a PDF, publish a real one. Section508.gov’s guidance on creating accessible PDFs requires structural tags that give assistive technology a logical reading order, real text rather than scanned images, and alternative text on images. A scan of the printed bulletin is a picture of a document, and a screen reader gets nothing from it. Export from the source file instead, and post it by Saturday evening so members who read ahead have it.

Where a graphic carries the details of an event, the details must also exist as text. The W3C’s alt decision tree puts it directly: when an image contains text that appears nowhere else, that text goes into the alt attribute.

Announcements, capped

Give each announcement one sentence of purpose, one date, one location, and one action. Move the explanation to the newsletter or the website. Five items is a healthy maximum for the printed list. Wording for each category is set out in church announcement examples.

Two things stay off the page regardless of space. Private care detail without permission, and anything touching a political campaign, which the IRS treats as absolutely prohibited for a 501(c)(3) organization, with revocation of exempt status among the stated consequences. A bulletin is organizational speech in a way a member’s conversation in the parking lot is not.

Three formats

Weekly half-sheet. A stable service with few announcements. Cheapest to print and the easiest to keep accurate.

Full worship guide. Worth the pages when the congregation responds throughout the service or the season carries a fuller liturgy.

Digital bulletin. The same order published as accessible HTML, with links that work on a phone. Keep it identical to the print version so ushers are not answering two different documents.

The volunteer workflow

One editor, one proofreader, every week. The editor pulls the order of worship from the pastor by Thursday, announcements from ministry heads by Friday noon, and prayer requests from the care team with permission recorded. Print Saturday or early Sunday. Late changes go on the screen and a typed insert, never a pen correction on 200 copies.

Advent, Lent, and Holy Week get insert pages rather than a cramped cover. Plan those months ahead against the Advent readings and the liturgical calendar.

Print for average attendance plus twenty percent. Stack every entrance, side doors included.

What to cut when the printer says you are over

In this order.

1. Announcements unchanged from last month.
2. Long pastoral letters, which belong in the newsletter.
3. Community events with no church connection.
4. Anything political.
5. Inside jokes that exclude a visitor.

Never cut Scripture references, hymn numbers, or the license line to save space.

Review it every quarter

Sit with the worship leader and an elder every three months. Does the printed order still match how you actually worship? Are the hymn numbers right for the current hymnal? Which announcement has run every week for a year without producing a single action? Are the phone numbers, room assignments, and links still true?

A bulletin nobody updates teaches the congregation to stop reading it, and then the one week it matters, nobody does.

Sources

• Cornell University Library, Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States. Checked 29 July 2026.
• CCLI, Church Copyright License. Checked 29 July 2026.
• US Department of Justice, ADA Title III Regulations topic page. Checked 29 July 2026.
• US Department of Justice, Guidance on Web Accessibility and the ADA. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Section508.gov, Create Accessible PDFs. Checked 29 July 2026.
• W3C Web Accessibility Initiative, An alt Decision Tree. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Internal Revenue Service, The Restriction of Political Campaign Intervention by Section 501(c)(3) Tax-Exempt Organizations. Checked 29 July 2026.